By Michael Kuperstein, Metaphor Solutions
Have you ever wondered why building a voice user interface (VUI) isn’t as easy as building a GUI? You know how to build a Web GUI in an hour or two, so why isn’t there a toolkit that lets you do the same for a VUI?
A VUI toolkit is now available. The Metaphor Conversation Manager (MCM) toolkit enables you to build professional speech applications for Microsoft Speech Server. MCM leverages the Microsoft Speech Application SDK (SASDK) and its speech Web controls, and lets you write plain C# managed code to build complete speech applications — from dialogs with callers to back-end integration to communications with live service agents — all in one programming environment, and all using only one syntax: C#.
The MCM toolkit sits on top of speech Web controls and hides the low-level complexities of building speech applications, such as grammar creation, grammar binding, exception handling, and call event handling. In addition, MCM insulates the developer from the steep learning curve for mastering the speech interface while allowing complete control of advanced dialog features such as overriding default call-event handlers and enabling flexible dialogs where the caller can switch dialog topics at any time.
With MCM, you start building a speech application as you would any standard IT application in C#. MCM provides all the speech interfaces you need in its class library. Your C# code is the flow control of the conversation. If you want to say something to the caller, you use a Tell method and fill out the appropriate form. It could be text (for text-to-speech), audio, a string variable value, or a combination of these — all in one form. If you want to ask for information from the caller, you use the AskFor method and fill out a single form for what you want to ask and what you want to hear. The form values can be modified at run time for just-in-time prompts and speech recognition.
By putting together Tell, AskFor, Record, and other statements that create turns of conversation, you can build your speech application in hours or days, not weeks or months. You can intersperse call-flow control, back-end integration code, and logging code throughout your application using the diverse .NET system classes.
Let’s say that your boss wants proof that the applications you build are more than just sandbox toys. Can you build a speech application in less than a week that can actually be deployed in your company to service many concurrent callers on one Microsoft Speech Server? You can, with help from additional speech application resources. Besides the MCM toolkit, you can obtain 30 prebuilt, pretested professional applications, and 15 reusable speech modules — all in C# source code — and then modify them according to your company’s requirements.
You can also obtain prebuilt specialty speech grammars for commonly used U.S. name-and-address collection modules. These include recognition of 6 million street names, 100,000 first and last names, 8,000 cities, and all ZIP/Postal Code mappings.
All MCM projects can be exported to standard Visual Studio .NET projects to debug, extend, customize, and deploy, and can be deployed for any language that has a recognition engine.
Besides the development environment, MCM includes post-deployment application management tools. The Application Monitor is a Web interface that enables an IT administrator to observe system performance and modify logging levels under real-time load conditions, as well as log both standard and custom call and speech events. Standard reports generate call volume and call event analytics from these logs in dynamically defined date-time epochs. Another Web tool, the Application Editor, enables a non-engineer such as a Call Center Administrator or Business Analyst, to change prompts, adjust business variables, and perform other application revisions in real time, based on business requirements.
If you have been waiting for speech applications to become mainstream before jumping in, your wait is over. For more technical documentation on the MCM toolkit go to http://www.metaphorsol.com/MCM3_docs/MCM_3.htm.